The popular film review site, Rotten Tomatoes, gives its users two different scores to help them determine the quality of a movie. There’s the Tomatometer score, which tells us what percent of critics gave the film a generally positive review. And there’s the Average Rating Score, which tells us how good a film is based on a one-to-ten scale. These two numbers seldom agree.

Broadly speaking, the value that we, the viewing public, truly want to know is the Average Rating score. Yet advertisers prefer to use the Tomatometer score. I suspect that this is because the Tomatometer generally overvalues good movies, which makes “okay” films look better than they really are. But that’s not what I wanted to investigate. I wanted to see if there are movies out there that break Rotten Tomatoes — which is to say, I wanted to see if there was a solid relationship between the Tomatometer scores and the more valuable Average Rating scores, and if any movies broke that trend. Continue reading The movies that broke Rotten Tomatoes →